There was at least one promising indicator within the system, however. Juan Pujol had been a risk, a walk-in; earlier in the war, the British had made an even more unorthodox bet that was beginning to pay off. The wager was on human capital. Highly eccentric human capital, to be specific.
When war was declared, the British intelligence services went on a hiring binge. There simply weren’t enough experienced secret service officers to go around; one branch, the Naval Intelligence Division, went from fifty staffers in 1939 to more than a thousand by 1942. And to fill the offices of MI5, MI6 and the other outfits involved in the doublecross campaign, the British made a conscious decision to leave tradition behind: they recruited not from the usual sources—the colonial services in India and Burma, and the British military—but from the universities and the intelligentsia. This search for warm bodies led to some memorable job interviews. Bickham Sweet-Escott, an applicant to MI6’s Section D (for “Destruction”), the group that specialized in sabotage, was told by his interviewer, “I can’t tell you what sort of job it would be. All I can say is that if you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery, and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.” He signed up and found the explosives expert he was working with was a former boxing promoter and test pilot who spoke in bizarre rhyming couplets. Writers seemed to be special favorites of the intelligence branches, especially those who pumped out thrillers: Geoffrey Household, the author of the minor classic Rogue Male, was sent to Bucharest, where he alarmed his office mates by drinking too much and “playing casually with detonators.” A Force, the Middle East deception unit, featured a chemist, a merchant banker, a music hall illusionist, a screenwriter and a handful of painters and other artists. “We were complete amateurs,” said Christopher Harmer, a British lawyer turned spy-runner, “not much more than overgrown schoolboys playing games of derring-do.”
For years, the intelligence services had been the home of clubbable young society men and veterans of the Indian colonial police force; “eggheads” were looked down upon and rarely hired. Now the British government began signing up academics at a furious clip: historians, linguists and classicists for the spy services, and mathematicians and scientists for analytical jobs like codebreaking. Oddballs, such as the almost unfathomably brilliant Alan Turing, became the order of the day. Turing bicycled to work at Bletchley Park, the headquarters of the cryptanalysts who produced the famous Ultra intercepts, wearing a bulky gas mask to avoid pollen. Earlier, he’d converted all his money into silver ingots, in preparation for a Nazi invasion, then dug a hole in a nearby forest and stashed the bullion there. (After the war, he failed to find it again.) Bletchley Park became a cross between an arts commune and a Bloomsbury party. When Winston Churchill toured the facility, he told its director, “I told you to leave no stone unturned to get staff, but I had no idea you had taken me literally.”
The spy services were less overtly eccentric, the private lives of officers hidden behind good pedigrees and dark Savile Row suits. Tommy Harris was a successful art dealer with a specialty in Goya. His fellow spy Anthony Blunt was an art historian. Kim Philby considered his best officer to be Paul Dehn, an entertainer who “bubbled and frothed like a trout stream” and would later write the screenplay for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Many of these men had no intention of working in intelligence after the war, and so they didn’t feel that one bad idea would ruin their career. Pujol, who was a kind of refugee of the imagination—uncomfortable in Franco’s straitjacketed society—fit right in.
Many of the men who eventually led the deception effort against Hitler were outsiders, with a strong element of veteran intelligence men thrown in to provide balance (and who immediately began to complain about the strange people down the hall). A number of staffers in MI5—including some Jews and homosexuals—would have found themselves in concentration camps had they been raised in wartime Germany; certainly the casual atmosphere that reigned, with ideas “whizzing up and down the corridors,” wouldn’t have worked at Abwehr headquarters in Berlin. It was a different mindset, another world. With the enemy poised opposite its shores, England didn’t have the luxury of playing conservatively, and the British felt that intelligence was one area where they had an almost inborn advantage.
When Pujol arrived, the doublecross initiative was just beginning to sputter to life. Anachronisms like Lieutenant Colonel Lumby—the man who’d burned a sensitive file when it got too bulky—were shipped off to less important spheres and bright young men were brought in to lead the effort. Tommy Harris was one of them.
In their tiny office on Jermyn Street in St. James’s, Juan Pujol studied his new partner and was instantly struck by Harris’s intensity: “He smoked like a chimney and the fingers of his right hand were almost chestnut colored as he never put out a cigarette until it was about to burn him.” Pujol thought Harris a kindred spirit. Kim Philby once described the atmosphere in certain British intelligence agencies as fostering “a fresh riot of ideas.” That was true about the office on Jermyn Street. In Harris, Pujol found a more calculating and far-seeing version of himself.
The two men were enigmas even to those who knew them best. In Harris’s looks there was a whiff of mystery. One intelligence officer called him “a casting director’s ideal choice for a desert sheikh or a slinky tango lizard.” But there were hidden depths behind the good looks. “There are many questions about him which are and will probably remain unanswered,” wrote the MI6 officer Desmond Bristow. “It is true to say that I knew Tommy Harris well; on the other hand, there is part of him I perhaps knew then, and know now, but did not and do not wish to believe.” Andreu Jaume, a family friend of the Harrises who now lives in the spy’s house on Mallorca and has been researching a biography of him for years, has never been able to wrap his mind around the man. “He’s like a runaway figure for me. The more I pursue him, the more he eludes me.”
Harris was thirty-four at the time he met Pujol, the only son of an observant Jewish art-dealer father who had married a Spanish woman from the southern city of Seville. Tommy’s grandfather and his great-uncle on his mother’s side had, in the 1800s, revived the art of the toreador by appearing in the bullring dressed in the costumes of El Cid and other Spanish heroes; they kept horses in stables at their Madrid home and became famous as the “gentleman bullfighters.” His father, Lionel, opened an art gallery specializing in Spanish greats like El Greco and Velázquez in London’s fashionable Conduit Street. There his business flourished. Dukes, foreign dignitaries and members of the royal family would come by and chat with Harris about the latest Spanish trends in chiaroscuro.
Before the war, his son Tommy, a “brilliantly intuitive” artist, joined his father in the gallery. Tommy Harris would travel the English countryside, getting himself invited into mansions and Edwardian castles and charming the resident dowagers into selling him their treasures for a song. Tommy married an English girl, Hilda, and their home, at Chesterfield Gardens in London, became a salon steeped in art, alcohol and good food. “During my occasional visits to London,” Kim Philby wrote, “I had made a point of calling at Tommy Harris’s house,” where he lived “surrounded by his art treasures in an atmosphere of haute cuisine and grand vin.” The house next door was owned by the chairman of Sotheby’s, who often dropped by. Rothschilds rubbed elbows with Bond Street art dealers and half-soused earls. When war came, the basement served as a bomb shelter, with London swells sleeping off the champagne and canapés in the semidarkness. Upstairs, a strange constellation of future spies came together, drawn by the warm light of Harris’s hospitality. Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Kim Philby all gossiped and networked at Chesterfield Gardens. (The three, along with Donald Maclean, had already switched their allegiances to Moscow, forming what became known as the Cambridge spy circle, a revelation that would shock the British spy establishment in the early 1950s—and cause Tommy Harris much heartache.)
Harris loved champagne and wild parties, but there was always a part of him that remained shut
tered and off-limits, accessible only through alcohol or painting. His art was striking and often jaggedly intense. A reviewer of his work in a London newspaper wrote: “These paintings do have an intriguing, disturbing vibrancy. Stabbing brush-technique; our old friend ‘the nervous line’ hepped up to hecticness.” But whatever his inner tensions were, early on it became clear that Harris was the right man to guide his new recruit through the labyrinth of the spy game. “Pujol’s genius was Latin but the plan was Anglo-Saxon,” a Spanish journalist would later say. It was true enough. Pujol contributed cunning and a sense of style, Harris strategic brilliance and order.
Together these two men sat down in a small office in London and endeavored to defeat the Third Reich, largely through the use of their overheated brains.
8. The System
THE DOUBLE AGENT SYSTEM inspired a raft of metaphors to explain it: it was like an orchestra, with “first violins” playing the main theme, “second violins” supporting them, and the conductor—in this case, J. C. Masterman, head of the XX Committee—blending the dissonant chords of sabotage, political disinformation, rumors and physical deception into a single symphony that was then broadcast to the Germans. Or it was a cricket side—a description favored by the sport-mad Masterman. There was only one crucial difference between the game and espionage, he argued: “our best batsmen … might be past their best or even deceased before the date of the final game.”
But neither orchestras nor cricket teams involve the one thing that made spy operations click: artifice. In fact, the thing the doublecross effort resembled most was the Hollywood studio system. The double agents were the actors, the public face of a huge undertaking designed to entrance an audience. Their case officers were their managers, and there was in fact heated competition among people like Tommy Harris to get their agents big roles in upcoming operations. MI5 was the studio, developing projects and doling them out to the right actor, tailoring the message to that agent’s image with the Germans. (Like many Hollywood stars, Pujol could never be allowed to break character or his career would be ruined.) There were scriptwriters—MI5 literally thought in terms of long-form narratives—and stories in which imaginary characters were introduced and then killed off at the right moment. The British army had “production teams” that supported the agents with fake wireless traffic, with the assets referred to as “Lighting, Scenery, Costumes and Property.” They even wrote “scripts” and chose actual troops to serve as extras and provide crowd noise. When they wanted to simulate an amphibious landing, for example, the sounds of a real landing were taped on wire recorders and played back during the actual battle.
Reviews, as in classic Hollywood, were important. The Allies had the Bletchley Park codebreakers, which meant that MI5 could listen to their critics in Berlin. If a report was relayed to Germany’s Foreign Armies West, then to Tokyo and Sofia, Bulgaria, and Istanbul, or if a fleet of Luftwaffe bombers was repositioned based on an agent’s flash message, that particular agent and script were judged a hit. The ultimate critic, of course, was Hitler himself, who signed off on only the most important Abwehr messages, indicating that he’d seen them and absorbed their content.
As in Hollywood, money mattered. The amount of cash each agent cadged from the Germans indicated how seriously he or she was taken. (Over his career, Pujol would exceed every other MI5 agent many times over, earning $1.4 million [at today’s value] and single-handedly bankrolling much of the doublecross system with his “earnings.”) Finally, the spies were given code names when they entered the system: as Issur Danielovich became Kirk Douglas, so did an underfed Welshman named Alfred George Owens become the dashing agent known as Snow.
Pujol was the promising new face who’d arrived from the boondocks of Lisbon. But he needed to be trained in the system. As they sat in their bare-bones office in Jermyn Street, breaking for meals at the Martinez Restaurant in Swallow Street, where they could indulge in authentic Spanish dishes, Pujol and Harris began to untangle the sprawling espionage machine that Pujol had so far kept only in his head.
Harris bent over a desk as Pujol talked, entering into a new logbook the numerous minute details of the imaginary subagents that the Spaniard had created. The fake subagents were given their own individual code name. The first agent became “J (1),” for “Juan’s Agent One,” and Harris opened a new file for each so that their imaginary lives could be recorded and no mistakes made. Pujol and Harris drew up a “character study” for all twenty-seven agents Pujol would eventually summon up, “realistic enough to create a clear picture in the minds of the recipients,” noting their every quirk and flaw. To flesh out the lives of these fictitious men and women, British intelligence employed a location scout, an officer whose job it was to drive around England writing down bits of local color for them to use in their travels: ice cream shops for them to stop in, hotels near military encampments for them to stay. Everything else was up to the spy and his case officer. Harris and Pujol had to choreograph every movement of every member of their network: their KLM pilot-courier, for example, couldn’t be represented as being in Lisbon when a letter from a different subagent claimed he was in London. It was a whole universe that needed to be constructed and rigorously maintained.
The thirty-eight messages Pujol had sent from Lisbon were sorted and catalogued, as well as the German responses. From now on, all of Pujol’s outgoing messages would be printed on pink paper, and all the incoming German messages would be on green. Harris finalized a delivery method for future texts: he and Pujol would write and encode the outgoing messages, then send them to Section V of MI6 in London, where they would be placed in a diplomatic bag and taken to Lisbon. Risso-Gill, the man who’d brought Pujol in from the cold, would have an agent deliver them to the poste restante box, where the Germans would pick them up. The Abwehr was encouraged to believe that the letters were still being delivered by the imaginary KLM pilot Pujol had recruited months earlier.
By April 27, 1942, everything was ready to go, except for one last piece of business. Pujol needed a new code name. Arabel was the name the Germans had given his network, but of course MI5 needed a new moniker. When Pujol had arrived in England, an MI6 officer had dubbed him Bovril, the meat extract that the English had turned into a hot drink. But now that Harris had taken the measure of the man, the name no longer fit.
Double agents were usually shifty or revoltingly needy, cornered into working for their enemies because of money trouble, homosexual blackmail or vanity. They were often bad spies and worse human beings, and their controllers usually gave them disparaging names, perhaps as a way of distancing themselves from the craven lot. There was Agent Careless, “an extremely indiscreet and truculent fellow.” There was the Snark, a Yugoslavian maid of no real account who once hatched a plan to have an enemy eaten alive by rats in order to get information from him. There was a pair of newlyweds and their dubious friend code-named the Savages. The list went on: the Weasel, Cocaine, Slave, Washout, as well as the Worm and BGM (Blond Gun Moll), a Cretan woman and low-level spy who carried a gun in her handbag “and knew how to use it.” (It was said she’d once used the pistol to kill a man, though another theory said she’d actually thrown him off a roof.) Only a select few were given honorable names that suggested a real interest in the person.
But Pujol fell in the latter category. Because he struck MI5 as “the best actor in the world,” he was rechristened Garbo, after the actress. Like his namesake, Pujol seemed to have an unapproachable core that remained elusive no matter how long one studied him. The code name might also confuse the Germans into thinking that Garbo was a woman, giving Pujol an extra layer of security.
To turn Garbo into a full-fledged Abwehr star, Harris and Pujol began to fill their Berlin-bound messages with “chicken feed”—basic military information, accurate, but of little value. Access to the truth was the great advantage that Pujol had gained by entering the doublecross system; he’d make no more mistakes about wine-drinking Scots. Every week, if not every day, the
XX Committee sent a fresh batch of material that could safely be woven into Garbo’s sprawling narratives, encoded and sent across to the Germans. This was known in the service as “buildup”: the Abwehr would slowly be convinced that Garbo had access to better and better information, most of which checked out. Some of the letters were sent directly to Madrid with a London postmark, to prove Garbo was really living in the British capital.
Garbo’s “agents” were now roaming all over the country, and their reports read like a spy’s Baedeker of small towns and harbors: “The beach here is mined. There is a very large gun in Singleton Park, but I could not find out if it is for A.A. [antiaircraft] or coastal defenses … Several large hangars. 15 barrage balloons—A.A. placed to the north and west of the aerodrome. Many sentries … The small port of Irvine is now being used for assault barges. I saw ten anchored.”
The correct handling of the delicate secret inks was a major area of concern. On November 11, 1942, the Abwehr spy-runner in Madrid, Federico, wrote instructions for the latest inks:
You moisten a sheet of paper for a few minutes in a bath of plain water until the paper is well saturated. Then get rid of the surplus water you then put the sheet on to glass so that it should adhere completely to the surface without forming air bubbles. On this moistened sheet you put another dry sheet which must adhere completely to the first. On this second sheet the secret text must be written with a hard pencil well sharpened and pressing fairly hard on the paper without breaking its surface. Then one must take off the dry sheet and the writing will appear on the first sheet in transparent form.
Many of Garbo’s letters were sent to cover addresses in Lisbon and appeared to be normal correspondence between friends or family members; the real message, of course, was between the lines in invisible ink. For this, Pujol and Harris had to invent a host of fake civilians to cover for their fake agents. One such family—two brothers and their wayward sister “Maria”—wasn’t particularly happy.
Agent Garbo Page 10